Serious Photography — 10 Advanced Form Of Photography

While photographing day-to-day scenes are fun, there are several special, unique, artistic and field-specific forms of photography which require art and skill beyond photography itself. Here are 10 such advanced forms of photography which are relatively unfamiliar.

1. Aerial photography

   This involves capturing the earth’s structures as viewed from elevated positions. Don’t be confused with the name, it just refers to those photographs which cannot be taken from land itself. Various platforms for aerial photography can be helicopters, balloons, aircraft, parachutes etc.

2. Astro Photography

   This photography relates to capturing the celestial bodies invisible to the human eye such as stars, galaxies, nebulae, etc. For this, you need powerful telescopic lenses mounted in a fixed position or on a tripod.

3. Aviation Photography

   This form of photography is used for aviation purposes. It specializes in capturing the images of aircraft either flying or on ground. Depending on the location and position of the camera and the subject, this can further be classified into many forms like air-to-air, ground-to-air, ground-static, etc.

4. Fine Art Nude

   Nude photography is an art to capture the naked body as a landscape. There are various photographic aspects to the human body. A photograph of a person that is meant to be recognized is called a portrait and nude photographs often do not show a face at all.

5. Photojournalism

   It is specific part of journalism. It depicts those images which convey a story about a particular event, concept, phenomenon, etc. Photojournalism is trivially distinguished from documentary, street, panorama, banquet photography but the concept is similar.

6. Conceptual Photography

   Conceptual photography focuses on a concept or an idea to describe and explore a particular theme, subject or topic.

7. Infrared Photography

   Some films and (almost all) image sensors are sensitive to infrared light, if you want to filter out the visible spectrum of light and allow only infrared then you can  use infrared filters. It gives a black and deep red effect, which can be converted to black and white, etc. Infrared photographs convey a lot of what you can’t see normally with your eyes.

8. Underwater Photography

   Photographing subjects under water — in this photography, you find unique and vastly unexplored subjects like fish, marine animals, seascapes to shoot. Imagination and observation here become a challenge; you require special equipmentand techniques to capture images. One of the biggest problems faced during photography is the loss of colors and contrast because the wavelength of sunlight is easily absorbed by the surrounding water. Thus even with the naked eyes, only the blue- green tones are visible and it becomes quite a challenge to capture other hues.

   

   Swarm of Anthias by Erwin Kodiat

9. Ultraviolet Photography

   Similar to infrared photography, if you only want to capture the ultraviolet spectrum of light then you can use the ultraviolet(UV) filters. An ultraviolet filter blocks all colors and allows only ultraviolet wavelengths to pass to the camera sensor.

10. Panorama Photography

    It is a technique to capture images with stretched field of view. It is also called “wide format photography”. In a scene or composition when you want to capture a horizontally (or vertically) extended field-of-view, the shots are taken in parts and stitched together using a software to recreate the entire scene (which could not be composed/captured in a single shot).